


Each One Goes Alone

by ChiaRoseKuro



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, Introspection, Non-Linear Narrative, Psychological Trauma, Songfic, Utopia/Dystopia, basically lots of fucked up shit happens, depends on how you see things, mentions of abuse, possible gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 06:05:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11526093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChiaRoseKuro/pseuds/ChiaRoseKuro
Summary: They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves.They were not barbarians.In a town filled with happiness, where nothing was lacking and sadness was a construct only found scrawled into dusty tomes, Eren Jaeger was born and lived and grew up. It was an enviable life, a good and wholesome life.And then, when he was twelve, everything changed.





	Each One Goes Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Since writing academic papers until they bleed out through my ears does _things_ to my writing, it stands to reason that the first thing I'd push out after a month of activity is unrepentant angst, written to the dulcet tones of sad sentimental lyrics and right on the heels of conspiracy videos. You can also blame the two scenes in BTS' [Spring Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEeFrLSkMm8) which contained 'Omelas' for leading me to Ursula Le Guin's [The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas](https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf), which heavily influenced just about everything in this story. Incidentally, it might be worthwhile listening to the aforementioned song while reading this because I wrote almost all of this to that song, on repeat, for half a day.
> 
> I struggled a lot with tagging so I don't know if I caught everything (or what this should be rated as, hence the 'not rated' thing)... but if you're walking into this expecting redemption or the happiness Omelas promises, you may want to look elsewhere. Instead, this fic contains far too many references to throwing up, crying, helpless rage and generous servings of disillusionment verging onto nihilism and a loss of faith in humanity, so if that's not your jam then you may as well press that 'back' button right about now. If you're okay with what I've listed so far then by all means, read on!
> 
> Special thanks to the song and short story that inspired this, along with Sarii for demanding to read it when it was done. If it wasn't for her cajoling (after all the outrage at Le Guin's story; I feel you man, I don't care for the writing either), I might've ended up spending another month dithering on it. And maybe turning this into a 50k monster with a worse ending.

* * *

 

Eren is twelve when he first learns of the child, revelling in the victory of his first horse race and warm in the embrace of his sister and best friend. His mother calls him over with dancing eyes and a bright smile, the smell of freshly-baked bread and flowers lingering pleasantly in his clothes after she pats his flyaway hair and laughs, but takes him by the hand and begins to draw him away. He waves back to Mikasa and Armin, giving them a cheeky thumbs up that they return before scampering off, and he turns back to squeeze his mother by the hand when she turns to look down at him. There is something in her smile that is a little different, a twist he has never seen before tugging at the corners of her mouth, but she is his mother.

She is the one who has raised him to be happy and free, to ride horses without the fear of falling and to frolic in the fields of waving corn and grain when it’s harvest time. Eren can count the number of times he’s seen her without a smile on one hand, and could not even raise a single finger to signal the number of times she’s never had a soft word or soft arms or soft hands for him.

They are just taking a break from the festivities, Eren thinks to himself, and smiles brightly at grandpa Arlert while his mother bundles him into the house.

“Eren,” his mother starts, something brittle in her voice and the twist more pronounced on her lips, and that’s when he knows.

Eren is twelve when he first learns of the child, and that is the moment when he lets his smile drop.

 

* * *

 

Filth. So much filth.

Eren’s eyes water when he’s let into the room for the first time, plugging his nose with a handkerchief that does nothing to dampen the miasma of excrement and sweat. Dust motes dance in the weak sunbeam crawling through the floorboards, at odds with the faint retching noise he hears someone (Sasha, most likely) make, but that is not the first thing he sees when the tears leak from his eyes.

The child sits in the cage, knobbly knees drawn to its chest and lanky hair rubbing oil into its face and arms. It looks just as his mother described it: unclothed, unclean, unwanted. Mikasa pulls her scarf higher over her nose and fumbles for his fingers, but Eren hardly feels it when her icy fingers slip between his warm ones. He feels Armin press against his back, shivering and silent, when the caretaker kicks at the bars and yells at it to stand up, _stand up you pig didn’t you hear me?_

It stands, and it shuffles back, and the caretaker swiftly unlocks the door to shove a plate of food and a jug of water inside before the door is locked again. Eren watches as it shivers in a corner, bony fingers digging into wasted arms, but does not watch it shuffle back and sink into its own mess.

The happiness of thousands for the misery of one, his mother had said, and _oh what a misery it was._

Eren is outside, hands over his ears as its pathetic wheezing gasps and reedy sobs rattle around in his brain, tears and snot dripping unchecked down his face. There is someone smoothing their hand over Sasha’s back ( _ah_ , he thinks vaguely, _so it_ was _her retching_ ) and someone doing the same for him, brushing his hair back from his face as he gasps and sobs on the floor. Its paper-white skin and unnatural angles are imprinted on the back of his eyelids, agony and sorrow hooking its claws into his brain, and Mikasa shushes him when he squeezes his eyes and collapses to his knees.

When everyone has left, when there is only its thin screams of “I’ll be good please I’ll be good _let me out oh god let me out!_ ” Eren rakes nails across his cheeks and stumbles to his feet. For one terrible moment, he catches sight of a bloodshot grey eye staring through the curtain of its tangled hair, and then…

He leaves it alone to its terror and staggers back into the sunlight, but not even the laughter and warmth outside can dispel the frost in his bones.

 

* * *

 

“I knew its mother,” Eren is told, and _his_ mother laughs a little at the curiosity alight in his eyes.

There’s warm fingers carding through his hair and sunlight dancing across his skin when Eren hears his mother sigh, a soft sound that flutters out the window and leaves for a place unknown. He snuggles back into her arms when she leans in for a hug, pressing her cheek against the floof of his hair, and lets her next sigh sink into his scalp.

“You won’t know her,” she begins, voice light and airy in a way Eren isn’t quite familiar with. “I was pregnant with you when she left and her brother removed all her pictures the moment she packed her bags.”

_Who would want to leave a town like ours?_ Eren had wanted to ask, but his mother lifts her cheek from his hair to smile down at him and he lets it go with one of his own smiles. He thinks of a room upstairs, the sheets tucked crisply in like his own sheets will never be, and thinks, _ah_. Thinks of the worn red scarf he had taken off his neck and wrapped around Mikasa’s when she had appeared at their doorstep, eyes dim and mouth pressed thin, and thinks again, _ah_.

“Her brother was the caretaker until he left as well,” his mother continues, watching Eren nibble at his lower lip and smoothing a thumb over the indents left there, “but we all knew it was only a matter of time. He could never smile around the child and it bled through, you know?”

He doesn’t, really. There is no experience he can compare this to, no person he knows who could not smile and who could not be happy when there were so many reasons to be thankful. Good food, good friends, a loving family, a loving community—what more did one need? Eren tries to think of a child all alone, without someone to hug them and without a kind word to brighten their life, but all he can think of is Mikasa twining her fingers into her scarf for the first time.

Loneliness, grief, sorrow. What do they look like outside of flat words on a page?

“It was just the right age when the last one died, choked on a bit of corn meal and grease. There were others that could be chosen as well, but it… it was a quiet child.” Eren feels his mother take a deep breath behind him when she rests a faintly trembling hand on his head, but when he looks up at her she looks as she always has, crinkled-eyed and smiling. “I’ve never gone to see it, but if you want…”

A child all alone, without a mother to hug them and friends to cheer them up and someone to care for them. A child who is not a he or a she, but an _it_ if he wants to be degrading and a _them_ if he doesn’t.

“I’ll go,” Eren says with conviction, and his mother replies with a soft, “Okay.”

He smiles up at her, anticipating a pat to his head or a nose scrunch in his hair, but his mother only smiles back a little vaguely before she stands. When he stands to go after her, his mother extends her hand and he takes it, running a thumb over her careworn skin.

 

* * *

 

“It was an honour to sacrifice your child for everyone’s happiness,” Eren hears ringing through his ears.

It doesn’t stop him from throwing up into the toilet bowl until only bile dribbles down his chin.

 

* * *

 

The person extends a hand to him and Eren takes it with a firm grip, doing his best to keep his face relaxed and open as his arm is pumped up and down. He takes a seat as he’s bombarded with words (“Hange, primary caretaker of the child and they/them pronouns, please and thank you!”) and he weathers through it all, like his mother told him to. When they’re done speaking and their hands have gone from flailing to fidgeting on the table, he looks them in the eye and declares, “I’d like to see the child.”

“Of course, of course!” Eren squints against the glare of their glasses as their hands go flying again, opening and closing drawers with half the coordination and four times as much noise as anyone else, but Hange cheerfully babbles a loud, “There’s already a few other people who’ve signed up to see them but I’m afraid we’ll have to schedule all of you in staggered intervals, you know? Don’t want to overwhelm them and kill the poor thing from shock; it’s lived for this long, it can live for a little longer.”

In the midst of more questions and comments and exclamations, Eren finds a pen thrust into his hand and a rather empty-looking waiver being smacked onto the space in front of him. He signs it in a shaky hand, EREN JAEGER staring up at him in messy block letters when he’s done, and Hange interrupts themselves mid-sentence to hum and whisk his pen and waiver to goodness knows where.

“I’ll let you know when you can see them, okay?” is said as he’s chivvied outside with insistent shoves. “So off with you to the festival! Can’t let a wonderful day like this go to waste, can we?”

He’s about to open his mouth and tell Hange that there’s always festivals, that every day is pleasant and he’s not losing anything at all, but they’re throwing a careless goodbye back at them and hurrying away. With a smile tugging at his pouting lips, Eren lifts his own hand and pretends he doesn’t know his farewell is missed before he turns to leave.

 

* * *

 

Dinner sits untouched at his door, but Eren barely spares the cooling tray a glance as he clambers onto his bed and tucks his knees to his chin, like he’s been doing the past few days. Not even the fading sunlight outside, brilliant in its purples and pinks against a rapidly darkening sky, is enough to put a smile on his lips.

He is beyond tears now, seized in a numbness Eren has never felt before and would not have been able to fathom before he saw it— _them_. For years he’s waded through grass, splashed in water, danced beneath the sun while someone sat in a room and cried themselves hoarse. For years he’s had a mother clothe him and a father praise him and a sister to hold his hand and a best friend to laugh with while someone sat, naked and unappreciated and alone and sad.

_Pig_ , they had been called. Being yelled at like they were dumb, hobbling on legs shrivelled and wasted from malnutrition, shivering from abject nakedness and crying from a lack of love. Eren stares at the food growing cold on his tray and scrambles to his feet, stomach lurching with something unpleasant and all too familiar in the past days.

This time, nothing but yellow-white bile dribbles from between his lips, but Eren stares at the trickle with blurred eyes and sinks his fingers into his hair, screaming himself hoarse and then banging his head against the porcelain until his mother rushes up to restrain him.

Even when his head throbs from torn roots and broken skin, Eren stares up at the ceiling and presses a hand to his burning eyes. Even with his stomach begging for food and his mind begging for sleep, he scrunches up his nose and thinks of a living ghoul sitting in its waste, crying with a voice that grows quieter day by day.

His eyes are still open and burning when the sun rises again.

 

* * *

 

“I bet you’re going to cry like a baby once you see it,” Jean laughs, as soon as Eren declares he’s going to see the child.

There’s no malice in Jean’s tone and nothing to suggest that he’s thinking derogatory thoughts for all this, but Eren can’t help the way his smile wavers on his face. Mikasa had held his hand and told him that she’d come too, even though he’d overheard her telling their mother that she was okay with it, that as long as she had her family then she’d be happy. Armin had dithered, scuffing his shoe on the pristine cobble underfoot before he’d smiled back and said yes in a small voice, but Jean…

“It’s not like _you’re_ going,” Eren pouts, and Jean laughs before slinging an arm around his shoulders.

“Hey, it’s not a bad thing,” Jean says, when Eren turns his face away with a quiet harrumph. “You wanna go see it, then good for you. You don’t wanna go see it, then good for you too. It’s not like it matters when looking at it won’t change a thing, right?”

“Wow, who knew you could say smart things?” Eren quips back, and lets a laugh slip past his lips when Jean squawks and punches his arm.

They tussle for a bit, ruffling each other’s hair and yelling in each other’s faces until they collapse by a wall and laugh with each other. Eren’s never seen anyone else with a relationship quite like his and Jean’s, the sort where hugs are just as likely to slip into wrestling as they are to become deep, heartfelt moments, but he looks at his friend and feels a smile pull at his lips.

“I’ll tell you what you’re missing out on when I come back,” Eren declares, and Jean snorts at him.

“Yeah, you do that,” he laughs back, and Eren rolls his eyes before picking himself up and dragging Jean to his feet, too.

_I’ll show you,_ he thinks to Jean’s retreating back. _I’ll show you what you’re missing out on, and then I’ll be the last one to laugh._

 

* * *

 

In the end, Eren does not tell anyone about the child who sits in a cage underground, but it does not seem to matter much because they all understand anyway. They hear it in his voice, listen as his words tumble and shatter in the air with a shortness and anger that nobody else in their town possesses. They see his eyes cloud over and his mouth press into a thin slash on his face, watch as he shuts the door in their face and spends his days and nights by his window.

His mother tries to appeal to him, once. Tells him that the happiness of thousands hinges upon the sadness of one, that the abject misery of a child brought everyone to appreciate and love their other children more. _What can you hope to do for it?_ she asks his unresponsive back. _Everything we have is because of this child; take it away, and we lose all we have._

The questions spin in Eren’s head, chasing each other’s tails until there is nothing but a feeble body clinging to question marks that twine in and out and through it and each other. Loneliness and guilt and sorrow; what emotions they were indeed! No flat piece of paper could help him come up with even a single kind word, no ink enough to detail the roiling things in the pit of his stomach. So much superiority over dealing with the truth, and all he had to show for it was nothing, not even a single chance of happiness for the one that needed it most.

_But that is the whole point,_ a voice that sounds suspiciously like Armin says. _The certainty of happiness for many thrown away for the uncertainty of possible happiness._

_And there are other things, too,_ a voice that sounds suspiciously like Mikasa adds. _Will it even know what happiness is, will it ever grow to love the sun and sky and earth like you and I have?_

They leave him alone to brood and brood he does, staring out the window as the sun and moon dance around each other in the sky. Darkness and light and darkness again, but all that changes is the dryness of his cheeks and the wetness of his eyes.

“He’ll be okay,” his mother whispers outside his door one day, “I went through the exact same thing when I was his age.”

 

* * *

 

They go through the motions: flinch at the opening of the door, stand and shuffle away when the bars are kicked and insults are screamed at it, shiver while everything is quickly dropped in, and shuffle back when the door closes. He watches Hange and their assistant (Moblit, _Moblit_ , and what a strange name that is to his young ears) go through the motions too, rattling the bars to shock them out of their mindless gibbering when they unlock the cage, sweep things up as necessary and give what little it needs when it’s not, then relocking it all again.

Hange asks Eren if he wants to help, at some point, but all it takes is the memory of a single grey eye, bloodshot and swollen behind a curtain of tangled hair, for him to press a hand to his mouth and shake his head until the joints in his neck go off like firecrackers. The memory is enough to last him a lifetime but the sight is not, apparently, because he finds himself there again and again before he can really think about it.

He goes and looks his fill, but it does not get easier to watch the second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth—

 

* * *

 

Eren is almost thirteen when he comes down the stairs to eat breakfast with his mother and father and Mikasa for the first time in a long time. He smiles awkwardly and pats his mother’s back when she cries on his shoulder, smooths back Mikasa’s hair with one clumsy hand so that she doesn’t smear tears and snot all over it. His father pats him on the arm with a kind smile and he feels his eyes blur over, but not a single drop spills from his cheeks when he digs into all his favourites.

Everyone welcomes him back with open arms, running their hands over his hair until it’s more tousled than a bird’s nest and laughing in his ear until he’s almost convinced he’s deaf. He bears through Armin’s screams and Jean’s punches, even helping to pound on Sasha’s back when she catches sight of him and chokes on her mouthful of cheese and bread, and his smile threatens to split him at the seams. _How are you_ and _we’ve missed you_ and _it’s good you’re back_ are bandied about, and he nods back with a _thank you_ here and an _I’m sorry_ there.

For a time, everything is well. Eren wades through fields of waving grass, dives into crystal-clear waters and raises his voice above the sound of tambourines and trumpets. People hold his hand, caress his cheek, pet his hair and give him hugs, which he all returns because it is the right thing to do. He laughs and smiles as though nothing is wrong and when they ask if he’s okay, he says he is until they question him no more.

For a time, everything is well and he looks content, back to the boy they all knew.

Then there is one night when Eren wishes them all a good night, kisses his mother’s cheek and hugs his father and Mikasa, then watches them all go upstairs. With a final smile to their retreating backs, he picks up his bag and shoulders it with a quiet huff, before he nudges the door open and closes it shut behind himself.

Nobody ever sees or hears of Eren Jaeger again.

**Author's Note:**

> Have a cookie if you figured out who the child was (and yes, I would've tagged more characters if I didn't want to give it away).
> 
> I _may_ come back and write that 50k monster with a terrible ending, depending on whether anyone would be interested in seeing a continuation to this, but that's all from me for this particular idea. On the off chance that I do end up continuing it, though, I'll be sure to announce it on my [tumblr](http://chiarosekuro.tumblr.com/waffles/).


End file.
